If you’re looking for poetry that explores the dystopia we’ve woken up in, poems that remind us we’re all animals even when we write and dream, Mirage of Burning Things will be affirming, even as it releases you as disturbed as when you arrived. Parlyaree Press is winking, knowing we’re all on the platform, but the trains have stopped running.
Tag: poetry
A review of Neolithic Imaginings by Loralee Clark
This is a vast and ambitious collection which is totally imaginative and unlike anything I have read. After reading Neolithic Imaginings, I look at the night sky wondering about my place in that sky and my connection to those who stood full of hope among the stones, dwarfed by their immeasurable mystery and beauty.
A review of Good Girl by Holly Coleman
This is a chapbook to read aloud, to read to a lover, or to read alone as an act of self-pleasure. In her essay(s), Coleman strives for clarity as she navigates the strict rules of syntax she must master in order to go free—she is a woman expected to say certain tame things who instead writes the forbidden correctly.
A review of Days & Chances by Joanna Klink
Klink’s writing is carefully measured, with a cadence that pulls the reader forward persistently. Strong emotions contain just enough curiosity to ground the flow. Her line breaks feel so natural, it’s tempting to forget they once had to be carefully determined. This morning, the sun still rose, but it will set tonight with more poignancy. The rain, like the stages of grief, pounds, weeps, self-sooths, and endures.
A review of Women: 20 Japanese Female Poets / 20 Waka Poems edited by Naoko Fujimoto
Juicy might seem an odd word to apply to a sophisticated layering of multiple renderings and contextual frameworks of ancient waka poetry. But through Fujimoto’s arresting haibun paragraphs, interpretive and spacious translations, and visual/graphic pieces that stand on their own right, these 20 women poets, and the eras they lived in, come to life in vivid, haunting detail.
A review of Brood Chamber by Annie Mairéad Hunter
One of the most powerful poems in this collection is “Whale Fall”, a poem that follows the descent of a whale as it falls to the ocean floor. As with most of the poems in this book this one works on multiple levels: literal, ecological, metaphoric, and emotional, exploring what humanity has done to the whales, created a “universe of useless things” with its hunted bodies.
A “Full-Feathered Companionship”: On Marjorie Maddox’s Hover Here
In her newest poetry collection, Hover Here, Marjorie Maddox rejects the harried pace of modern life while never losing track of the urgency to move closer to what matters. What matters is relationship, and these poems invite us, even beseech us, to deepen our companionship with nature, ourselves, and each other. To do so means experiencing love alongside sorrow, remembering in order to forget, and embracing the shadows while noticing the flowers.
A review of Girl Trouble by Diana Whitney
Whitney also addresses the rape of the planet, which comes from the same destructive, patriarchal impulses of greed and power. So much of the drama takes place in the youth jungle of school settings – high school, college, even middle school (junior high) and earlier.
Pretending a Beast: A Review of I Can Tell You the Version That Will Make You Take My Side by J Brooke
I Can Tell You the Version That Will Make You Take My Side is a powerful, necessary testament to human resilience in the face of a stifling society. The collection shows that the struggle for independent expression can be messy, even painful, but ultimately worth it. It will resonate with many people in the LGBTQIA+ community while also serving as an accessible window into a queer experience for people outside the community.
A review of Something Small of How to See a River by Teresa Dzieglewicz
That importance Dzieglewicz felt to write the book resonates in the world and on the page. The reader feels it from the jump: the foreword and timeline of events — which gives the reader the necessary historical and cultural context upfront, unlike many collections — and the first poem, which takes place a year after she left camp: “though / the river is not untouched, still, it squalls with life.”